Time Capsule voting

Comments

Are there any guidelines on what TCs can and can't have (both text and items)?

Nothing official.
Here's some of the rules I follow when voting on capsules though:

No mentioning successfully escaping or surviving.
No mentioning being the last survivor of the Aurora.
If mentioning the Aurora, no mentioning how long you've been there.
No end-game or overpowered items.
No spoilers in the screenshot, or the text. (What exactly counts as a spoiler is debatable. For example, I personally think pictures of any of the leviathans close-up is a spoiler, as your first encounter with that leviathan will be slightly less exciting/terrifying afterwards.)
No directly breaking the 4th wall.
No self-advertisement.
Must have some modicum of effort put into it. (Unless you're being very clever, one small sentence just doesn't cut it. And no pictures taken from the launch tower or the ship you lazy bum.)

Apart from that, I think the most important thing is to create a time capsule that you yourself would have liked to receive, one that would add a little something to the world of the one who opens it.

Purge completed. I deleted 70,839 low quality Time Capsules. Almost 100k left in queue.

I updated the voting page too. Now it displays TC content, and has waaay better after-voting feedback on it.

Seeing the contents is a big plus. I think the next logical step would be to hide capsules after the user has voted on them. Seeing the same submissions over and over again is probably making people less motivated to go through a lot of these things.
Also, how does automatic removal of TCs work now, exactly?

@AceDude I have a suggestion that can help pare things down even more: any TC message that goes 40 characters without a " " gets automatically pruned. That way, people who type (for example) BALLSBALLSBALLSBALLSBALLSBALLSBALLSBALLSBALLSBALLSBALLS ad nauseam won't break scrolling.

Accompanied by a beautiful shot of the cyclops descending into a deep chasm, shot from below into sun rays, with some blood kelp on display. See s9.postimg.org/ciyy7b5d9/image.jpg - I can't upload images to the forums yet.

Apart from that, I think the most important thing is to create a time capsule that you yourself would have liked to receive, one that would add a little something to the world of the one who opens it.

Unfortunately I think there will always be questionable time capsules getting through no matter how the system is set up.

As you mention, from a gameplay perspective, these tend to break the player's immersion in the game world. This is mostly an issue for your first time through the game. In any subsequent runs you already know a lot about what's going on.

To mitigate this issue, my suggestion:

In the game's options, have a checkbox to include time capsules in your game.

At first, that checkbox is "off" by default.

Once the player has completed the storyline, the checkbox is "on" by default.

This gives a new player a chance to complete a non-spoilered first play-through, but still allows returning players the fun of finding messages and trinkets on subsequent play-throughs. And if somebody really really loves/hates time capsules, they can manually control whether they appear in the game.

Any chance we can get a way to search, sort or filter the voting queue? I spent 40 minutes going through stuff from 4 weeks ago and I'd like to spend less than a day just getting to current items. Maybe start removing items that get X amount of down votes as well, no sense in keeping around ones that people dislike.

Love the feature and the system but looking for a better UX for making sure appropriate ones get into the game.

Anyone know why there's no new time capsules listed? It looks like either the site stopped taking new ones or it hit some sort of limit. There's hundreds, and hundreds of TC's from "1 month ago" according to the site but nothing sooner.

** Edit: So I see that they're just listed oldest first. Wtf's up with this? It'd be IMPOSSIBLE to see any entries that are newer than launch day unless you have the fortitude and no life to sit & hit "Load More" for 2-3 hours. You guys really need to re-evaluate how you present the TC listings.

AT LEAST make them newest first. There also needs to be filters for at least screenshot or no, number of items submitted and language used.
Sorting options would be nice too. At this point it's literally pointless to submit a TC. No one will EVER see it if it wasn't submitted over 4 weeks ago, let alone enough people to get the TC 10 public votes to get to the moderators.

And just to gauge how many were submitted, I got to 3 weeks old before my browser started to run out of memory from the massive scrolling. Based on those hash values & an average of 2 number 5's each, there must've been ~15000 TC's. And that's ONLY 3 weeks old and more.

C'mon UW, you guys are smarter than this. You made such an amazing game, don't sour it with this feature.

*** Oh and 1 last bit. Why do I need a login for steam to play the game. A 2nd login to post on the forums and a THIRD login to vote on the TC's? Please integrate that with forums or steam, or both. Please.

ahem.. *clears throat*
So like most people here I finished the game and wondered, where my submission went. And whether there was a chance to see it again. I expected a lot of submissions and an at first growing backlog, but the rating system was, and still is, woefully inadequate for this mass of submissions.
Since I was done with game itself and the Subnautica backend provides the capsules as nice JSON (and me being obsessed with piles of data), I started collecting it into a MySQL database to get an overview about what we are dealing with here.
For this reason I'll use SQL-snippets later on. This is just my way of managing the data, not necessarily how UWE does it (though, probably in a similar vein).

A couple of numbers to illustrate how insane this really is:
At the moment about 3k capsules get submitted per weekday, more at weekends (https://paste2.org/LaIAY51F).
As a quick back-of-the-napkin math. If AceDude spends 5 seconds evaluating a capsule (alone, as he described), he would need to spend over 4 hours per day just to keep up. It is unreasonable to ask this of any single person!
As I am writing this, there are almost 140k capsules in the queue.

So, unless more people get assigned, this pile will just keep on growing.
Alternatively UWE starts to more heavily rely on automated filters. There is a lot of fluff waiting and I imagine manually clicking through all of it to be pretty disheartening.
I've tried to apply a couple ideas to the data. Maybe some of them can be refined into a working state to relieve some of the work. I want to stress, that I don't deem most of the filtered capsules malicious. But within the context of the game most are probably just not useful enough to keep.
(Folded into a spoiler to keep the page readable)

text must contain multiple words:

`text` NOT LIKE '% %' AND NOT `text` REGEXP '[^\\x00-\\xFF]'

This sounds stupid, but then you check it and realize about 4k capsules consist of single word messages, that are questionable at best and usually just tosh.
I did not encounter false positives with this restriction. One caveat though: Asian symbols can make sense without spaces, that is why I included the restriction for ASCII and Latin-1 characters (german umlauts, french accents, ect.).
examples:

I'll admit, that 15 is an arbitrary value, but then again, there are more than enough capsules still waiting without ones that consist mostly of "Hi and bye", "Good luck" and "I was here".
Nothing malicious but not really valuable either, in my opinion. Again, Asian symbols contain more "meaning per symbol", so these might need special treatment again. Matches about 16k capsules at the time of writing.
examples:

(The REEEEEEEEEEE!!!!-filter, if you will) Again, an arbitrary limit that matches about 1.5k mostly nonsensical messages, though there are also some mixed in between, where the author is just creative or very enthusiastic.
examples:

This is my personal opinion, but capsules should never break the fourth wall. Besides, external links in general are a risk anyways. You don't know whats on the other end of it. Should probably be extended, but right now already matches about 1.5k capsules.
examples:

Yeah, another debatable bad-word list. Also yeah, every word matches at least one capsule. (in total about 100). I abstain from examples in this case, but here is a honorable mention of a capsule containing an adapted preface of the communist manifesto.
Obviously this does not match typos, conscious or otherwise and non-english slurs. But I'm honestly baffled, that even these simple cases aren't preemptively filtered.
honorable mentions:

Alright, subjective preferences time! I for one don't get it. The plot doesn't really twist, but the way it unfolds, taking parts of it away by telling it beforehand really hurts the experience.
You can only experience the story once. Sure, you can goof around in multiple playthroughs, do a hardcore run, if you are so inclined, but now you know what is going to happen. Finding a capsule containing hatching enzymes and instructions where to go and what to do downright murders the mystery.
examples:

This is probably the most contentious one. What is too much is very much personal preference, but there are 4k capsules containing Hatching Enzymes alone ... something that I'd rate as a heavy spoiler.
Then again, there are capsules containing unobtainable items. Reefback Eggs are probably harmless, but why would one add items, that don't do anything or even have no name, description or icon. (People apparently love to add terraformers and red and white tablets... about 2k capsules are affected)

After reading all of this again I feel the issue lies deeper. For one, there are no official guidelines on how a capsule should look like.
Does it have to have an insightful comment? Is describing the experience the player had acceptable? Does it have to be in-character (or in-universe)?
Does it have to have creative art? Or since the game never tells you how to 'import' 'screenshots', what should or shouldn't appear in a screenshot? Does it need an image at all?
Are useful items a requirement? Personally, I'd say no. Then again someone on reddit complained about one of purplemews capsules (the ones with great custom art) not having items.
What constitutes an inexcusable spoiler? And I feel especially this point is in dire need of an official definition. The spectrum of personal preferences is just too wide.

Even more importantly. What are time capsules currently trying to achieve? And in the same vein; How many time capsules does Subnautica even need?
Are time capsules a way for everyone to passively interact with other players? Then every submission has to be considered.
Are time capsules a flexible way to fill blanks in the world, to make each playthrough different? Then a total of one or two thousand capsules should be enough and quality is of utmost importance.

Either way, something needs to change. The current system is unworkable.
As was already mentioned, unchecking the "submit to server" checkbox by default would probably reduce new submissions by quite a bit. Then clear guidelines, even in-game, would help immensely in creating and assessing time-capsules.

@Sarjuuk he already has something in place to filter, so he just sees the more popular ones.

How to clear your Cache, by 0x6A7232.How to use console commands. (Currently PC only, sorry)
Stuck, and just want to most recent base/Cyclops? Use "Warpme" command. Want to get out of the ceiling? Press F1 and note your camera postion. First number is North/South, second number is up/down, and third is East/West. Reduce the 2nd number by 10, then use "warp x y z" (where x, y, and z are the position you want to be).

I've got an update for you! I finally made the already-voted-on capsules disappear.

Also, some stats for you. Some people have bunch of misconceptions, so I hope it's going to give you an idea what I was working with:

Queued for voting and moderation: 111,327

Active: 301

Spawned: 1,186,044

Deleted: 126,413

There's no magical way of handling that. If we want them to be good, we need to work together. One by one, oldest to newest. My own Time Capsule is there somewhere. If I'll have some time, I might invite more people to moderate the capsules, skipping the queue. But given how much work we have right now, it's rather a low priority

I have an honest question about the Capsules. Is it considered bad if I added a few late-ish game items to one to help someone else along? I mean, most of them are super RNG-based given there's no way to guarantee that you'll find one in every playthrough.

Personally I would prefer if someone didn't give me the most potent end-game items out there, but then again I was ecstatic when I opened up one and found a stasis rifle within 5 minutes of playing. Had no clue what I was doing and it definitely was the coolest moment to know I found a solid defensive tool like that so early on... I ran through SO many batteries firing at everything that spooked me. It was kinda comical after a point, especially when I got spooked by sand sharks while gathering...

Two days ago, I found a time capsule that had an ion cube, I think that it mentioned the QEP, and it spoke about being the sole survivor of the Aurora. Isn't that some of the stuff that should not be allowed? I mean, I'm grateful for the cube, since it let me activate warp gate there, but yeah.

It is my opinion that the best place to build a base is the northern end of the Sparse Reef.